Mark Twain Made Me Do It and Other Plains Adventures
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Mark Twain Made Me Do It and Other Plains Adventures is a collection of humorous essays portraying western Nebraska life and culture of the 1950s. Anecdotes on small-town baseball and the polio epidemic of 1952 provide a historic backdrop to the story of a wide-eyed boy exploring the limits of his universe. The adventures of a Twain-inspired raft trip down the South Platte and Sputnik-inspired homemade rockets mirror a society of seemingly settled lifestyles and frenzied technological advances. Family travels, holidays with Grandpa and Grandma, and marvelous creations like his sister’s stories of Susabelle and the magic Band-Aids weave a splendid tale. But Jones’s world is not one of sentimental nostalgia; running battles with town bullies, sobering encounters with religious buffoons, and an impressive collection of pedagogues specializing in violent corporal punishment capture the earthy essence of a world now largely disappeared.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In recent years the premature memoir of the young or floundering writer has established itself as a fledgling genre. While many of these hasty autobiographies seem of scant interest to anyone except the most dedicated literary groupie, Jones (The Farming Game) offers a collection of essays that recalls the youthful credulity of America in the '50s as much as it does his often hilarious, Huckleberry Finn-inspired misadventures. The son of a Methodist minister, Jones progresses from a four-year-old concocting gurgling chemical experiments in the parsonage's upstairs toilet ("Pot Roast Every Sunday") to a high-schooler recounting offbeat church legends at a typical '50s holiday get-together ("The Clan"). Over the course of these essays, Jones comes of age, which means he settles into living inside narratives he understands are larger than his own ("Polio," "Growing Up Methodist"). Though Mark Twain's two shortest essays--"Heading West" and "Back to the Basics"--prove transitional and a little sentimental, Jones's prose remains clear and energetic throughout. He's careful, as well, not to fall victim to cheap nostalgia. Leave it to a junior-high-school writing teacher living in McCook, Nebraska, to figure out how to get around that hazard.
